How to Bake a Perfect Life (9 page)

She nods, petting his head.

“I guess we need to figure out how to introduce him to the cat, to start the process of getting them used to each other.”

“Maybe I can just feed him and then go upstairs? I’m super-tired.”

“Sure. That’s fine.”

As we pour some of the dog food we bought into a bowl, she says, “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I heard you crying. Is it about … my dad?”

“No. I’m mad at somebody, that’s all.” Merlin sniffs the food and starts to wolf it down. “I promise that I will tell you everything I know about your dad the very minute I see you after I find out, okay? Will that make it easier?”

“Yes.”

I draw a cross over my heart and hold my palm up in a vow. “Promise. Consider it done.”

Once I get the dog and the girl settled, I head back down to finish my breads, thinking about Cat, about my brother’s snide comments, about the rift in our family, and Dane and my sister Stephanie.

Dane is my ex-husband, a man I probably never loved. He
came into the business as the operations manager for the entire Gallagher Group.

Until he arrived, the restaurants ran independently, more or less. Dane came in and reorganized the structure so that we could centralize ordering, personnel, storage, bookkeeping, and all that kind of thing. He brought us online, organized accounts, essentially brought the structure of the business into the twenty-first century, and it was a godsend. Within a year, profits were up 23 percent.

He was also good with my dad, jollying him out of his stubborn-mule-who-has-to-do-everything-exactly-his-own-way snits. My dad feels an obligation to make sure the Gallagher Group functions well. His father opened the first Gallagher’s, out on the highway to the top of Pikes Peak. It’s a tourist mecca, beloved, and it shows up on all the postcards—a time machine. My sister Sarah and younger brother Liam run it. They make their own ice cream and pies, and it’s bright and full of postcards and books about Pikes Peak and booths with lacquered things on the tables, the history of the area. It’s famous mainly because it’s a good place to stop on your way back down, when you’re tired and thirsty and want to absorb that terrifying drive.

The other two restaurants are the Erin Steakhouse, which my father opened in the sixties and built into one of the premier restaurants in the city, and The Banshee, Ryan’s pub.

I loved the business from the time I was a small girl, and I particularly loved the steakhouse, which my sister Stephanie now co-runs with my father. That was the position I wanted—to learn the business and work with the family—but when I got pregnant at fifteen, my father was so humiliated that it happened in his restaurant that he could never let me back in.

So I worked as a cashier in the summers at Gallagher’s Café and Gift Shop. I loved talking to people from all over, loved the pride I felt in being a native of Colorado Springs whenever people expressed their wonder over the beauty of it. Loved it in
every way. But I did need to go to college, and there wasn’t time for Sofia, college, and a job like that, which was a bit of a drive from home, so I did part-time personnel work for the business. Office stuff, which my mother hated. I had a proficiency for it—not that anyone has ever come out and said that—and I did well enough that I studied business and marketing in school.

Somehow, I ended up managing most of the internal affairs at the restaurants—office work split between three sites, because by then Ryan had opened The Banshee. I was good at managing all the backstage stuff, and I liked it, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. I prefer the creativity of the food or the pleasure of being in contact with the customers.

But I
was
good. My title was Assistant to the Operations Manager; in actuality, I was doing it all myself. Then the old operations manager resigned, and, rather than put me in charge, my father hired Dane instead. He claimed I was too young—I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I can’t remember which—but it was really just a way to dis me again.

Big, hearty Dane, whom my father adored like a son. They’re a lot alike—charming, full of laughter, quick with a story or a joke. The difference is that my father is a one-woman man and Dane is a ladies’ man of the highest measure, a quick-tongued devil.

I did not like him at all when he came to work for us. I was furious that he’d taken the job I deserved and hurt that my father still didn’t respect me. So I did not exactly make Dane’s life easy. We spoke only in the most civil of terms for well over a year after his arrival, long after he’d charmed everybody in the family and the restaurants. To her credit, my sister Sarah never really liked him, for the same reason I had my doubts: Such a big personality probably didn’t have a lot of substance to it, and, at the very least, he was an egomaniac.

But we made a decent pair in a business sense, and together reorganized everything and eliminated thousands and thousands
in repetitive costs. Little things like ordering in bulk and big things like eliminating superfluous positions that could be brought under the umbrella of the operations manager. Him. And me.

The person who adored him from the minute he arrived was Stephanie. He called her Petunia for no reason I ever understood, and she loved it. It’s possible that they might have slept together at some point. Despite the fact that I’m the one with the bad rep, Steph is the one who has slept with a few too many men over the years. It is something she used to confess to me at times, swearing me to secrecy, which I honored. Men love her—not that she realizes it. She’s been seen with a lot of movers and shakers over time, men with good cologne and clean-shaven jaws. Like Dane.

Not my type. I met a lot of men like that in school and they left me yawning. Which naturally meant Dane worked very hard to capture my admiration.

Three things happened all at once. Sofia got bronchitis one winter and couldn’t shake it. She was sick for weeks and eventually went to the hospital with pneumonia. My family, of course, rallied as they always do, and work was covered so I could be with her. Both of us were completely worn out by the end of it, and Dane offered us the use of his condo in the mountains. It was heaven-sent, and I liked him so much better for it.

A little while later, Dane made my father give me Employee of the Year, which I’d never won. He cited all the work I’d done, detail by detail, on the reorg, and two weeks later he said, “Your family does not appreciate you at all, do they?”

Which was exactly the right thing to say.

Then he invited Sofia and me to go skiing. I’d never tried it, and Sofia was desperate to give it a shot. He promised that it was strictly friendship, and I’d been to the condo so I knew there was plenty of room.

Whatever else I say about him now, he was so good with my
daughter. Patient, funny, a good teacher. She could be aloof with people, but she let her guard down wholeheartedly with Dane. We had a great weekend, and I admit there were some sexual sparks. It would be hard not to have them around him—he’s just that kind of man. He knows how to look at you. Knows how to pick the things you’ll need to hear. The last night I let him kiss me, and he was—surprise!—a very good kisser. It had probably been, at that point, about six years since I’d had sex. I fell. And with Dane, it was sex like I’d not really had it before. Falling-off-the-bed sex. He knew what he was doing.

In the morning I was horrified, and he even knew how to manage that. He said it would be our secret. We’d never do it again. No one would ever know.

The trouble was, we worked together all the time. He’d bend over my shoulder and his breath would brush my neck, and I’d remember something. I avoided him.

I told myself that it would be a fling, that we’d have a good time and that would be that. But affairs are hard to keep secret in a restaurant, and when my father found out, he was not pissed off but
thrilled
. My mother adored him. Sofia loved him. For the first time in about a decade, I had the full approval of my family—maybe even Steph, though she was in the depths of a very tangled love affair herself and never had time to talk.

Dane and I got married. It seemed like the thing to do.

Katie

  S
he awakens to the slow, patient wetness of a tongue moving over her fingers. When she stirs, Merlin jumps up eagerly and Katie says, “It’s the middle of the night! Go back to sleep!” and pulls the covers over her head.

He nudges his nose under the covers and makes a soft “whuff.” Katie remembers that he doesn’t have any way to go to the bathroom unless she takes him. Abruptly, she sits up. Merlin backs away, leaping lightly and jerking his head toward the door. It makes Katie laugh. She puts on a sweater—Ramona was right: It’s cold in the middle of the night here!—and clips Merlin’s leash to his collar. Barefoot on the wooden steps, Katie follows him down, down, down, through the house kitchen and down the back steps into the backyard.

She unleashes him there and stands in the darkness with her arms crossed over her chest. The grass is damp beneath her feet, and it smells like flowers, the purple flowers on the bushes all along the yard. She never knew flowers could have so much smell or that they could be so perfect and beautiful. Even in the darkness, when they are pale gray, she thinks she can see an edge of blurry purple in the air.

Two squares of light fall on the grass from the bakery kitchen, and Katie wanders over curiously. Two women, maybe about
the same age as Sofia, are dressed in white chef’s coats, with their hair caught back beneath scarves. One is taking care of a big bowl being mixed up by a machine, while the other is shaping dough into long tubes on the metal counter in the middle of the room. Katie’s stomach growls.

Ramona comes into view, too, her hair tightly braided away from her face, the same white coat on. Her pants are green and loose, and she’s wearing those stupid plastic shoes. Who wears stuff like that? Katie’s mother would make fun of her.

But Ramona seems happy, moving around the room, gathering bowls and spoons and stuff, laughing with the other two. Even in the middle of the night.

For one long, pained minute, Katie thinks of her mother in the middle of the night. Two weeks ago. Three. Her face had gotten real bad lately, with scabs and one open spot that got all pussy and disgusting, until Katie brought her mom into the bathroom and poured hydrogen peroxide on it. It bubbled and bubbled and got a little better the next day. But her mom was so skinny that Katie could see there were two bones in her forearms, and she didn’t even have any breasts anymore. All she wanted,
all
she wanted, no matter what, was more crank.

Katie realizes she is biting on the inside of her cheek again and makes herself stop. Her mom
will
get better. She’s cleaned up before. Katie can remember how pretty she used to be, when she did her hair and put on lipstick, or even when she was in her dress uniform.

She lets go of the fists she made and turns around to look for Merlin to bring him inside. He’s sniffing around in the garden.

Ramona had asked how Katie found him, but Merlin had found her. He just appeared on her front porch a couple of hours after her mom got arrested. Katie saw the police coming and ran out the back door to hide in the alley so they wouldn’t put her in a foster home. When she came back to the house, everybody was gone. She was scared by herself with no electricity,
and all she had to eat was a loaf of white bread and a can of Vienna sausages she’d bought with pennies and dimes she scrounged in the gutters. She had no idea what to do. Where to go.

Then, like an angel or something, Merlin wandered onto the porch and came over to her and licked the tears off her face. She opened the sausages and he ate one, very, very politely, and ate some of the bread, then drank water out of the toilet. She thought he would go then, back to the homeless camps near the railroad tracks, but he didn’t. With a sigh, he curled up next to her and went to sleep. He didn’t even mind that she wanted to hold on to him.

Now he’s digging a little in the flower beds, and Katie is pretty sure Ramona won’t like that very much, so she walks over and tugs on his collar. “Come on, Merlin. I want to go back to bed.”

He snorts and sneezes, planting his feet in the dirt so he can keep smelling. “Merlin!” she cries. “Come on!”

He doesn’t move.

Behind her, the back door opens. “Katie?” Ramona calls. “Is everything okay?”

“No! He won’t come in!”

“It’s all right. I’ll watch him and bring him up when he’s done. You go on back to bed.”

“That’s okay. I said I would take care of him.”

Ramona comes outside, wiping her hands on a cloth attached to her belt. “It’s really okay, I promise. We’ve started baking, so I’m awake. You’re a growing girl. You need your sleep.”

Katie is afraid Ramona will put an arm around her, but she doesn’t. “Okay,” Katie says. “I’ll leave my door open.”